Story teller with the art of innovation

Jesse Cox parlayed his love of story telling into a highly successful and innovative career in radio.

By Benjamin Law and Josephine Tovey

January 5, 2018 — 5.03pm

It's tradition that anyone who sleeps at the Parisian book store Shakespeare and Company – from Ernest Hemingway to Anais Nin – must leave the shop a short biography of their life. In 2006, a then-20-year-old Jesse Cox wrote: "I like telling stories and in particular I like telling other people's stories."

This past November – just over a decade later – Cox won a Walkley Award for doing exactly that. As executive producer of the ABC true crime podcast Trace, Cox helped steer the team that investigated a murder case that had lain dormant for 37 years and, in the process, made the most successful podcast in the national broadcaster's history.

Walkley award winning radio producer Jesse Cox.

Modest as ever, Cox's new colleagues at Audible had to wring it out of him that he'd even been nominated for Australia's most prestigious journalism prize. And few of Cox's former ABC colleagues that night knew he was – at that stage – living with a rare form of cancer. For Cox – right until his sudden death on December 19, at the age of 31 – the focus remained squarely on the work, on other people's stories and "getting shit done", as was his personal mantra. Regarded as one of the finest radio producers in Australia, Cox left an indelible mark in a career that straddled art, documentary and journalism and won him accolades in Australia and worldwide. He had boundless enthusiasm for finding new and engaging ways to tell human stories, during a time when radio was undergoing a podcasting-driven renaissance.

"Jesse led a new generation of audio storytellers," Radio National presenter Hamish McDonald told Breakfast listeners the day after Cox died. "There are some bright and brilliant minds at RN, but there are none so bright and brilliant than Jesse."

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Jesse Cox and his wife Que Minh Luu in Tasmania

Born on September 5, 1986, in his family's front room in Annandale, Sydney, storytelling was a constant thread in Cox's family. "Jesse with his brother Jack constantly created stories together, and often performed them with their friends," his mother Louise Cox says. His paternal grandmother, Lesley, was a radio star of another era; part of the long-running ABC radio serial Blue Hills, and one half of the BBC's The Amazing Piddingtons, a magical radio double act alongside Cox's grandfather Sydney.

"He grew up with a sense of theatre, and of audience," says his father, Mark Piddington. Years later, Cox would produce a radio documentary about his grandparents – Keep Them Guessing – which won the Directors' Choice Award at the 2013 Third Coast International Audio Festival, often referred to as the "Sundance for sound".

Even as a child, Cox showed a knack for the medium. For his third birthday, his parents gave him a tape recorder. His first recordings involve him speaking to a pretend audience.

After graduating from Leichhardt High School, Cox got his start in radio as a volunteer on Sydney community radio station FBI. It was there in 2010 that he, Eliza Sarlos and Brigitte Dagg co-founded All The Best - a weekly storytelling show that blended documentary, interviews and fiction. Something of an Antipodean cousin to This American Life (TAL), it became an incubator for a generation of radio-makers that is still broadcast nationally today.

Jack and Jesse Cox, with their parents Louise Cox and Mark Piddington, walking in Nepal in 1996.

Cox was keenly plugged into the international podcasting revolution but he never sought to simply replicate American successes - he wanted to create a uniquely local sound and tell Australian stories. "It was beyond curiosity," friend and collaborator Jamie Gerlach says. "Jesse wanted to know what people were thinking; he was actively and authentically engaged in what other people were up to."

It was also at FBI that he fell in love with fellow radio-maker Que Minh Luu – now an executive producer at ABC TV – whom he'd go on to marry. Luu and Cox walked down the aisle side by side – having decided no one would give either away – in November 2014 at Rodd Park, near where Cox as a child used to sail with his dad. At the traditional Vietnamese tea ceremony, Cox wore a non-traditional Hawaiian-shirt-meets-regional-landscape-patterned ensemble.

Jesse Cox in the outfit he wore to the traditional tea ceremony as part of his wedding to Que Minh Luu.

"I always felt very taken care of and supported," Luu says. "He was a deeply feminist person, brought up by two incredibly feminist people – he was given his mother's name and not his father's. He would always help me to speak up; he was always my sounding board. He helped bring order to what I wanted to do with my life. I've become more than I would have been without."

Cox joined Radio National's Creative Audio Unit in 2013 brimming with energy and ideas. In 2014 he became a producer and presenter on storytelling show Radiotonic and in its inaugural year, won another Third Coast award for The Real Tom Banks, a frank and tender portrait of a young gay man with a disability, searching for love and sex.

Jesse Cox and his son

There are some bright and brilliant minds at RN, but there are none so bright and brilliant than Jesse

Hamish McDonald

As a collaborator, Cox was renowned for his generous spirit and boundless energy, his wise counsel and his ability to straddle the creative, technical and organisational demands of his endeavours.

He understood that "real creativity is mostly work, and then more work" former ABC colleague Sophie Townsend says.

He was gregarious and charismatic, but was forever handing over the microphone to nurture and amplify the voices of others, especially women and those marginalised in the mainstream. When Radiotonic morphed into This is About in 2016, Cox and his colleagues engaged comedian and presenter Jordan Raskopoulos​, a transgender woman.

"It was him going, 'There are enough people like me; I can create a space for someone else'," says Luu.

Amazon's audio entertainment company Audible lured him away from the ABC in 2017 to be their inaugural Head of Original Programming in Australia, and he had already had a first project greenlit in his few months in the job.

Despite his dizzying career, Cox's proudest creation was his son Alfred Dao, who was born in 2015. In their last weeks together, Cox would read to Alfie from his favourite book: a full-colour booklet of non-alcoholic cocktails with funny names that Alfie found hilarious. "Jesse grew up with an abundance of love," his mother Louise Cox says. "And that is how he lived his life, and what he gave us all." Piddington adds, "He fathered as he'd been parented."

Jesse Cox died suddenly from a rare soft-tissue cancer called alveolar soft part sarcoma (ASPS), that had unexpectedly spread to his brain. He is survived by his wife Que Minh Luu, his son Alfred Dao, his parents Louise Cox and Mark Piddington, and his brother Jack.